Superior Quality Recordings

You are unlikely to find anything much better to read than Nir Rosen's report from Afghanistan. It's the journalism we've been yelling at the professionals to do for years. There's far too much to summarise, but one thing that strikes me is the sense of a world of tiny, hyperlocal, byzantine conflicts, with sudden interventions by people who may as well be on the moon - Taliban chieftains based in the UAE phoning in to say whether or not to kill the journalist, staff officers in Combined Air Operations Centres doing much the same thing, like gods in a Greek play.

Relatedly, Abu Muqawama deserves thanks for not swallowing idiotic red-baiting about "embedding with the Taliban". Whilst you're over there, don't miss the excellent series on Darfur and the complexity of a situation where the insurgents in one part of the country are effectively the counterinsurgents in another, the importance of missing one stage of student radicalism, and just how close they came to overrunning Khartoum.

Also, Dan Hardie is back.